Love and Death in the American Novel

by Leslie A. Fiedler, Charles B. Harris (Introduction)

A retrospective article on Leslie Fiedler in the New York Times Book Review in 1965 referred to Love and Death in the American Novel as “one of the great, essential books on the American imagination . . . an accepted major work.” This groundbreaking work views in depth both American literature and character from the time of the American Revolution to the present. From it, there emerges Fiedler’s once scandalous―now increasingly accepted―judgment that our literature is incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Writing, History, Literature, American

520 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Leslie Aaron Fiedler was an American literary critic, known for his interest in mythography and his championing of genre fiction. His work also involves application of psychological theories to American literature. He was in practical terms one of the early postmodernist critics working across literature in general, from around 1970. His most cited work is Love and Death in the American Novel (1960).

Reviews

[Paul Wilner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fiedler's nuts, but in a good way - brilliant riffs, particularly insightful on Twain, Melville, Hawthorne and pretty good on Fitzgerald, though he's dealt with more in passing. Some of the other stuff is scattershot, but that's on purpose; his central themes, while generally accepted (I think they;re accepted) now were groundbreaking at the time. His segment at the end on science fiction, followign a dissection of "proletarian fiction'' is offhand but totally on the money.

He is the critic that Harold Bloom would want to have been when he grows up, if Bloom had not decided to adopt the post of a sadder but wiser neo-classicist, a kind of academic Leon Wieseltier.

But I digress. Despite the lapses into occasional didactism, this is a real work of imaginative thought. In the preface to the second edition, Fiedler says: "It is my hope that to new readers and old, it will still seem as lively and, in the best sense of the word, as vulgar, as ever.'' Not a problem. No Lionel Trilling, he.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first I was put off by Fiedler's overblown, didactic voice, but then I found him a bit more entertaining--and wondered if he was fully serious with his tone. His constant categorizations of 'high-brow,' 'middlebrow,' and 'lowbrow' (he even uses 'low middle brow' a few times)came across as elitist--until I realized he was fully willing and able to consider the low brow stuff as an honest part of his criticsm. His thesis, that American literature has difficulty dealing honestly with human sexual activity and is obsessed with violence, is supported by a broad survey of iconic American fiction. I don't think this view is necessarily accurate today, especially regarding how contemporary writers deal with sex today, but it is surprising how obsessed with violence and death our literature (and culture in general)is. Fiedler points out in part of his analysis how the budding sexuality of Tom Sawyer, for example, is kept at bay and child like, but death and violence are all about and discussed without blinking. We see that today in contemporary pop culture;rape and murder run rampant in prime time, but have a wardrobe malfunction that hints at sexuality and hell breaks loose.
Fiedler himself wrote that he wanted this book enjoyed on a level that wasn't necessarily scholarly, but as a kind of 'gothic novel'--if you read it that way, you'll enjoy it more.

[Ljiljana Stancic · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book offers an answer into that eternally mind-boggling question: can literary theory ever be fun? The premise of this book is immensely entertaining because it appeals to our visceral interest, intellectual or otherwise, in Freudian slips. In very simple terms, all American novels worthy of Harold Bloom's canonisation are rooted in homosocial and, at times, homoerotic, environment and the only feasible fate for rare female characters is shame and inevitably tragic death. Fiedler really takes the idea of thinking out of the box out of the closet. His writing is persuasive, outrageous and hugely satisfying. No one seriously interested in American literature should skip it and no one reading it will be able to look at Huck Finn with the same innocent eyes again, the reason I would reluctantly recommend it to unsuspecting underage audience.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those books that, as an English major in college I always heard bandied about, but like most English majors never got around to reading. Finally, twenty years later, I did. It's easy to understand why "Love and Death" is the cornerstone for some much American Literary Criticism-- I could hear Fiedler's critical voice echoing through the other critics/critical reading I've done over the years. It truly is an essential book, and one that reminded me in no uncertain terms that being an active reader is not only pleasurable but necessary.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. I recommend it for any serious writer or student of American literature.

[Bill Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in grad school days in the English department, Fiedler was everyone’s critical deity. I didn’t read all of LOVE AND DEATH but I read the chapters most relevant to my classwork. Reading the entire book seemed like a daunting task, given as Fiedler is to wide-ranging references without much explanation, but I know a few more things now than I did back then.

Though L&D is primarily a work of analysis, it’s also a history of the novel as a genre, the fashions in romances, and especially the Gothic novelists, whose books were popular in the colonies. Fiedler follows the Gothic influence through the core classics, from Charles Brockden Brown to Nathanael West, and tosses in a few shots at contemporaries like Kerouac and Capote near the end. There’s also a brief discussion of detective stories and science fiction at the end that’s surprising and intriguing.

Fiedler is funny, sometimes caustic, always insightful. His Freudian analyses seem very dated but also add some charm. Altogether, a great book about American books.

[Fede La Lettrice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Davvero un ottimo punto di vista da cui guardare la letteratura americana.

[Alex Kudera · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1948, he wrote "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" and the essay was published in The Partisan Review. . . "genius," as they say, if such a term means anything at all. I read a Dalkey Archive reprint of Love and Death in the American Novel in the late 1990s or early 2000s after hearing a graduate-school Joycean mention each time we met--okay, a weekly seminar, time passed--"Have I recommended Love and Death in the American Novel?" It was as humorous as the undergrad philosophy professor who'd introduce after any prolonged silence: "My, it's stifling in here." Anyway, it sounds like Fiedler rubbed people the wrong way and wound up on the wrong side of communism when it cost others their careers, but I find it disappointing that his ideas have been so influential, but he is not often given credit when contemporary "scholars" discuss them. They mention much more recent "stars" writing after the 1990s, often in obfuscating prose. . . or this is my impression, anyway, and I was reminded of it recently when I saw a recent piece on race in Moby Dick although that article was very clearly written.

The Partisan Review, June, 1948 with Fielder, Anatole Broyard's "A Portrait of the Hipster," Elizabeth Bishop, Sartre, and more:
http://archives.bu.edu/collections/pa...

[Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

His main argument is that the American "novel," which he defines in by time and genre, differs from its European counterparts in that American writers are seemingly obsessed with topics such as death, female purity, incest and homosexuality. Fielder sets up some interesting comparisons between, for example Hawthorne and Flaubert, and includes a great deal of primary text analysis. I would have appreciated more thoughtful gender analysis (e.g. gender norms of the forming American culture and how they shaped literature), which he seemed to mostly gloss over, although he was writing in part about how women were portrayed and interacted with in fiction. An interesting read for those who are interested in philology or American literature, but nothing to prioritize to read tomorrow.

One quote that stood out to me, and is quoted often: “Our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and a woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.”

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought-provoking and worth reading, especially as I am currently planning some rereads of Hawthorne and Faulkner. I think his conclusions (or tone) can be a reach at times, though, which admittedly helps add to the interest of the book on occasion (I mean, I read good bits wishing I could argue with him about Faulkner, as my take on Faulkner's women, among various issues, is somewhat different).

This is also interesting simply as an illustration of changing tastes in literature. A lot of the contemporary and recent authors he writes about are largely forgotten or not read now, and far less likely to be studied in school than it appears was the case when the book was written (I mean people like Robert Penn Warren, who gets substantial discussion of books other than All the King's Men, and even Thomas Wolfe, as well as some more obscure names).

[Carol Storm · Rating 5 out of 5]

The two or three pages on "Puddn'head Wilson" by Mark Twain are absolutely staggering. Most of the material on Melville and Hawthorne is just as good. But there's far too much on dated, already forgotten writers like Charles Brockden Brown and Monk Lewis, not to mention Bernard Malamud and Herman Wouk. There's not enough on John Steinbeck.

And there's not a single mention of Edith Wharton!

[Loretta Matson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fiedler ’splains it all for you, which is basically that most of the great American stories are about boys running away from the world of civilizing women. It’s pitiful in some ways, but offers hope for the future. Let the great American story grow up!

[Amber Manning · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fiedler's important. Fiedler's a good close reader. Fiedler actively refuses to read women (writers and characters) well and that's pretty ridiculous...

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

What Fiedler finds when gazing on the landscape of classic American fiction is the palpable and conspicuous absence of a dynamic, full-fledged female form--that and the absence of generative heterosexual love--the two subjects at the heart of the European novel tradition. In place of "real women" and "love," the American novel is filled with violence, incest, and above all "horror." The American novel, Fiedler argues, is above all a novel of horror. "Our novels," he writes, "seem not primitive, perhaps, but innocent, unfallen in a disturbing way, almost juvenile. The great works of American fiction are notoriously at home in a children's library, their level of sentimentality precisely that of a pre-adolescent.. Our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid treating the passionate encounter of a man and woman, which we expect at the center of a novel." Fiedler is interested in archetypes, and what he finds when he looks at the tradition of the American novel (he identifies James as a "European" exception) is the image of men fleeing the "civilizing" influences of women, matrimony, domesticity, and the responsibility that inevitably follows; he finds a male protagonist (Rip Van Winkle, for instance) leaving behind the "bulwark of woman" to seek freedom, the wilderness, the rhetorical "west." They are overpowered by an impulse from the home to the frontier. In place of mother and wife, the lonely wanderer (unfallen, childlike) finds refuge in the arms of another man, a non-white man ("Queequeg, Chingachgook, or … Jim") typically. Instead of "real women," we find "monsters of virtue and bitchery, symbols of rejection or fear of sexuality" (that is, Richardson's Clarissa or the dark woman of gothic fiction).

Why is there an absence of "real women" and "heterosexual love" in American literature, according to Fiedler? Because of the country's puritanical uneasiness about sexuality (its "embarrassment" before sex), because of its lack of debased aristocratic and "courtly" traditions of gentility and love against which the novelist finds himself obliged to differentiate bourgeois love, because of a national ideology that sees America as a "dream of an escape from culture and renewal of youth."

Fielder is interested in the relationship between the European novel and the American novel. The European novel offered three main generic prototypes that American novelists might have used when forging their own tradition: gothic fiction, sentimental fiction, and historical romance, epitomized by Walpole, Richardson, and Scott respectively. In Fiedler's reading, gothic literature offered the fictional model that most captured the American novelist's imagination; it gave him the "cheapjack machinery … to represent the hidden blackness of the human soul and human society."

Fielding's claim is both captivating and disturbing--disturbing because there's some truth to it. It is also predicated on his circumscribing his area of investigation in a very particular way. There's no mention of Wharton or Chopin or Perkins for that matter-all women writers who put women at the center of their fiction. And where's Alcott? While I agree that a major strand in American fiction conforms to his nightmarish vision of a gothic and disturbing American canon, Fiedler overstates and distorts, and overlooks moments in the tradition that don't conform to his vision. The idea of the American novel as a "brilliant nightmare" is rather overstated.

[Patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

A work of literary criticism that is actually pretty fun!

Fiedler's basic thesis is still provocative: the greatest American novels (he focuses particularly on The Last of the Mohicans, Moby Dick, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) all feature a white man turning away from civilization and heterosexual relationships, choosing instead an intense bond with a man of color. Why is this? What does it mean?

Fiedler sets out to explore the causes behind this observation by looking at the rise and meaning of the novel itself, which means he spends at least half his book, if not more, focusing on early European novels. He insists that the very first novel was Clarissa (kind of an odd choice, in my opinion, since Robinson Crusoe fits his model so much better, but whatever; Crusoe gets one sentence out of this whole book while Clarissa gets chapter upon chapter), and that its dynamic of virginal-heroine-saves-rake set the tone for the next three centuries of novels. Add in a dash of Gothic, a sprinkle of Romanticism and eventually, according to Fiedler, you've got the Great American Novel. All of this is surprisingly entertaining; the five hundred pages of this doorstopper of literary criticism raced by, and I found myself more engaged than I'd been with several recent novels.

It's not all good; Love and Death in the American Novel is almost seventy years old at this point and it shows. Fiedler has an extremely normative view of culture, and he clearly assumes that the primary writers and readers of novels are all white men. On the other hand, he does sees gender and race as important categories of investigation, which is pretty remarkable for an idea that started as an article published in 19-fucking-48. He also has weird oversights here and there. For example, he spends a fair amount of time talking about Edgar Allan Poe, but almost all of it is focused on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a failure when it was published and nearly forgotten today. Many pieces of Poe's writing that I would assume are way more influential – The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Masque of the Red Death, among others – don't rate a single mention. Fiedler also falls down when analyzing writing closer to his own period. For all of his insight into 1800s authors, when it comes to the mid-1900s, he spends a bizarre amount of time on Marjorie Morningstar, a book I've never even heard of! He also dismisses The Great Gatsby, Shirley Jackson, and Flannery O'Connor as second-rate and not worth investigating.

Recommended if you're willing to overlook unsurprising but annoying tendencies of a book written in the 1950s.

[Katherine Addison · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a comprehensive discussion of American novels, from the first novel written in America (The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature, 1789)---before that, actually, since he starts talking about novels with Clarissa (1748)---up to the current productions in the 60s. It is engaging and entertaining, and I do genuinely feel I learned a good deal from it.

However, it has major drawbacks. Fiedler is enlightened for 1966, but---while he admits that (white) women and Black men write novels, and is even enthusiastic about Invisible Man---it never occurs to him that either (white) women or Black men have subject positions (and Black women do not exist). He completely falls for Humbert Humbert's story in Lolita, and never questions that OF COURSE a twelve-year-old girl seduced him and OF COURSE HH is the injured party. And he is quite unnecessarily catty about Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," calling it an "unwitting travesty" of the American adaptation of Kafka by writers like Nathanael West and Isaac Rosenfeld (492). In general, he suffers greatly from the idea that literature should be divvied up into highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow (with such gradations on the scale as "upper middlebrow," which is where I stopped being annoyed and just became amused by his posturing). Only highbrow literature is worth consideration and highbrow literature is, of course, only written by men. (George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans would get a pass, I think. But, being English, she does not get discussed.) The vast audience of novel-reading women merely serve to drag potentially highbrow male authors down to their middlebrow level. He is dismissive of science fiction, and detective fiction after Poe, and although he clearly loves the gothic, he only loves it if it remains pure and does not debase itself with what he calls "horror-pornography."

It is also notable and instructive that I do not recognize the names of most of the (white male) writers he mentions after WWII.

[John Tipper · Rating 4 out of 5]

A monumental, thought provoking study of the American novel. Although the title islove and and death in the ..., there's not much discussion of death, but there is plenty analysis of love and sex. Fiedler's main thesis is that writers in the U.S. don't know how to depict women in a positive, favorable way. He gives countless points of evidence for his ideas. Fiedler particularly ties into writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, and Twain. And then moves into the 20th century to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and especially Faulkner, the last whom he contends treats women the worst. However, Fiedler claims The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, and Huck Finn are great works of fiction. His orientation is Marxist/Freudian, so there's a lot of writing about class, the Id, Ego and Super Ego. It's a fascinating, if difficult read. So dense, I had to read over paragraphs twice at times. Fiedler excels at discussing Southern Gothic fiction, and the horror works of say Poe, Hawthorne, and Henry James.

[Richard O. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leslie Fiedler was a critical outlaw and this is his masterwork. He contends that the novel is a bourgeois invention and that while European novelists like Tolstoy and Flaubert were dramatizing adult themes Americans were writing "boy's books" with a chaste homosexual bond at its center. Like D.H. Lawrence, Fiedler seemed to believe America was "anti-life." "And again death, death, death, death" (Walt Whitman, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking")

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unscientific, no critical apparatus, no “theory,” no citations, no bibliography…and unsurpassed by any academic working in the last sixty years.

“Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how.”

[Almudena_am · Rating 4 out of 5]

Estoy segura que se me han escapado cosas. Necesitaría releerlo otra vez, pero me han parecido muy interesante las asociaciones que hace y el tono que emplea. No sé hace nada pesado teniendo en cuanta la naturaleza de esta obra.

[Daniel]

I despise this man and the Buffalo police were entirely justified.

[carson · Rating 3 out of 5]

read for class—
i actually don’t remember a single thing about this other than the fact that it was used when we were discussing american feminist critique in class.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

For Fiedler, American literature is the recurring story of men fleeing female-dominated, civilized society for the frontier. Of course it’s more complicated than that. The men usually flee in pairs. The pair is usually a white man and a man of color. There is a homoerotic undercurrent. Come back to the raft ag'in, Huck honey! Edgy when it came out in 1960, Fiedler’s exhaustive 600 page examination of American literature seems a bit dated now, although no less ambitious.

In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner saw the American character as shaped by the existence of the frontier. Fiedler is the Turner of literary criticism. Like Turner, Fiedler posits – although less directly -- the existence of the frontier as the formative element of the American psyche. And like Turner for American history, Fiedler for American literature is an early proponent, if not actually the first proponent, of a comprehensive explanation of his field.

But now the American frontier has closed -- we have gone from sea to shining sea —and as some of the energy once devoted to expansion turns inward to refine the republic, so does literature and literary criticism also turn inward. Hence the arid, rational, overly linguistic, essentially classical, navel gazing of deconstructionism and the more humanistic, irrational, emotional, essentially romantic, reassessment offered by queer theory.

And on we go.

[David Saliba · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute must read for all students of American literature. Fiedler's incites into the development of a truly "American" genre are critical for understanding the place of American literature in the history of world lit. Every professor of American literature I ever had was heavily inflenced by Fielder's ideas.

[Kit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Still a terrifically compelling study of a lot of books, even if he has a few huge blind spots and takes too many opportunities to be contemptuous of women's writing. And there's something wrong about adducing James Baldwin's writing as evidence that "we" are still compelled to fantasize about "our darker brother." He's not darker for Jimmy, Leslie.

[Mattschratz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating survey of lots of early American writing, and an equally fascinating artifact of American criticism in the 1970s (it's peculiar, for example, to hear Fiedler talk so much about Herman Wouk and Gore Vidal, neither of whom get talked about so much anymore).

[Cecile · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful expose of the grand themes of American literature and how they express the pathologies of American society. Covers the very beginnings in the 16th century up to mid-20th century. Invaluable for understNfing the American classics.

[April]

from Cultural Gabfest

[Jennifer Powers]

So in depth. I understood about half of it. I'll try again when I'm 40.
Even if you're well-read, good luck.

[Jeff Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

remarkable. makes me want to reread a lot of things. the commentary on Marxism, Queer and African American roles in literature were of particular interest to me. truly enlightening